Sunday’s PARADE features a rare interview with master storyteller Stephen King. His new novel, Joyland (a paperback original due June 4), follows lovelorn college student Devin Jones, who, while working at a small-time amusement park, learns the secret history behind a shocking murder.

“I’ve been typed as a horror writer, but I never saw myself that way,” King tells PARADE’s Ken Tucker. “I’ve reached a point in my life where I can write pretty much what comes into my mind and not worry about grocery day at Publix.”

In the exclusive online extras below, King shares the horror classic his mom read to him as a child and his views on gun control, a subject he also addresses in the Kindle Single essay Guns. Be sure to check out this weekend’s issue of PARADE for the full story, and watch our exclusive behind-the-scenes video with the author:

On reading as a kid — and the horror classic his mother read to him:“I grew up in a house where we didn’t have a TV until I was 10. We couldn’t afford one. We used to go down the street and peek in the neighbors’ window to watch Your Hit Parade. Books were what we had—and the radio. My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.

“And we used to get Classics Illustrated comic books, which were also fairly bloody. I still remember the Oliver Twist one—there was blood all over that thing. Comic books were the closest we had to a visual medium.”

On the CBS series Under the Dome, airing this summer. “I’ve seen the first two episodes in rough cut, without all the effects in. It looks good. It’s not exactly like the book. It’s like a pogo stick: It hits big set pieces in the book, then bounces in its own direction. So that’s fine. You know what’ll happen is the purists who loved the book will probably scream, ‘Well, this is different and that isn’t there…’ But I think most people are going to like it. I hope they will.”

On gun-control measure, a subject he also addressed in his essay, Guns, published as a Kindle Single on Amazon.com: “I heard that [the background checks legislation didn’t pass in the Senate], and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, they couldn’t even do that.’ It infuriates me, because most people would like to see some rational controls on guns. I think we all understand that they wouldn’t entirely solve the problem. I mean, in Boston they built bombs in pressure cookers. But you’ve got a roadblock of probably most of the Republican Senate and four or five Democrats who come from rural areas, some of whom are up for reelection pretty soon, who stopped what the public wanted.

“Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell say, ‘Background checks won’t solve the problem because crazy people will still get guns.’ To me, that’s tantamount to saying, ‘Why bother to make it illegal for kids under 18 to buy cigarettes, because they’ll find a way to get them anyway?’ But we know that those laws, [while] they don’t stop underage smoking, inhibit it greatly. These people are so shortsighted—this is going to happen again.”

On working with John Mellencamp on the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County:“He’s the most talented guy I’ve ever worked with. You have to get it right with John; he’s very exacting. He wants things to be really good. And if they’re not, or if people screw up their job, he can blow his top. But is he ever talented. We’ve never done anything like this before, and we learned as we went along. John says I write music like Dr. Seuss, because I put stuff in there and say, ‘Here’s what it’s supposed to be,’ and I give dialogue that rhymes. John would just sort of roll his eyes. But he wasn’t always able to integrate the songs in a dramatic way that moved things along, and I was able to craft pockets [for them]. And that was very, very satisfying.”

AMG/Parade Digital

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